7 Early Stage Startups to Watch in 2014; British Spy Agency Stored Yahoo Webcam Images; Report Says, Atlassian Wants to Take Git into the Enterprise with Essentials

British spy agency stored Yahoo Webcam images, report says

The GCHQ, the British surveillance agency akin to the NSA, captured Webcam chat images from millions of Yahoo users, according to a report by The Guardian.

The program, codenamed Optic Nerve, intercepted the images from 2008 to 2010, storing the content in bulk — meaning it was not a targeted effort, but that it spied on people not accused of any wrongdoing. In a six-month period alone, the agency reportedly captured 1.8 million images.

According to secret documents provided to the Guardian by Edward Snowden, the British agency likened the dump of images to a collection of mugshots of previously arrested individuals. The Guardian also reported that the GCHQ does not have the technology to ensure that no images of British and Americans were included in the program. Read more…

Google, Microsoft agree: Cloud is now safe enough to use

The two Internet powerhouses agree that it’s time to stop fearing cloud security and embrace the future at the annual RSA Conference. Read more…

7 early stage startups to watch in 2014

Watching the skies, keeping our ears to the ground – paying attention to the newest, most exciting startups is a pretty big part of what we do here at The Next Web.

But now and again, we like to collaborate with other companies that share our focus. So, we teamed up with Beta List – a site that documents early stage and pre-launch startups – to bring you a shortlist of some of the most exciting startups that have just launched, or are just about to launch in one form or another.

Some are further down the road than others, but all are early stage startups you might want to keep an eye on in the year ahead. Read more…

Atlassian wants to take Git into the enterprise with Essentials

The Australian development tools company looks to bridge its otherwise disparate products with a new package that combines JIRA with Git repository management.

Atlassian has aimed up at enterprise-level distributed source control that is integrated with issue tracking, as the company has released its Git Essentials package that brings together the company’s JIRA, JIRA Agile, Bamboo, and either Stash or Bitbucket products. Read more…